This essay examines the literature on the relations that exist between digital technology and the contemporary type of artistic works. According to the literature, contemporary arts encompass all the artistic works that have been produced during the period spanning through the World War II to date. This kind of art is often exhibited museums, contemporary art galleries or even the artists themselves. On the other hand, digital technology is a data system that makes use of discontinuous values. The development of this technology saw the use of mathematical concepts that had been coined in the seventeenth century that were generally based binary system of computing.
In the case of this essay, digital technology includes the use things like computer assisted designs, 3D prototyping and computer assisted jacquard weaving among others. (Bunnell, 1998) The entry of the digital technology has seen a tremendous transformation of the contemporary art practices. Indeed, in the last ten years several contemporary artists have tended to incorporate digital technology into their productions to the extent that it sometimes looked odd considering the emphasis that words like “hand work” as well as giving honor to the historical precedents mean in the definition of art and by extension craft practices. Indeed, it has actually made artists, various institutions of art as well as the audience to adjust to the new emergent ways. For instance, art institutions like “New Yok Museum of Modern Art” has had to break away from the historical practice in museums of displaying dead art and adopted the video art as the best alternative. (McCullough, 2004) The entry of the digital technology has caused a paradigm shift in artistic practices like painting, drawing as well as sculpturing.
Indeed, it has seen certain aspects of new technology incorporated into the category of artistic productions. These include the net art, visual reality and lately the digital installation art. Basically, a digital artist has become a reference for any individual who applies digital technology in the production of their artistic arts. In the area of contemporary art practices, it gives a connotation of one who uses digital media or in general terms the methods of mass production. (Bunnell, 1998)Digital Techniques in Visual Arts Digital technology has found a significant amount of applications in the mainstream media especially in the area of advertisements, making of films that give special effects. Moreover, the technology of desktop publishing is currently very popular in the world of publishing although it has a closer relation to graphical design.
However, it continues to hold true that both the digital artists as well as the traditional artists often make use of a variety of sources of electronic programs and electronic data to create what becomes of their artistic works. Nonetheless, considering the close relations that exist between visual type of arts and musical arts it generally accepted that the real value of digital type of art will move ahead towards a greater success in the same way that electronic production of music has been successful during the last three decades. (Coyne, 1995)The different types of digital arts can either be purely product of computer generation or just a modification of products of other sources like scanning, photographs or just a drawn image that has been made using the vector graphic technology. Although technically applicable for any art works done by the use of other media and eventually merely scanned, the term digital arts has remained a reserve of the type of art that has nothing more than just non-trivial modifications of the computer programs or any kind of electronic system that has the ability to interpret an input so that they can create an output. Moreover, text data that have been digitized as well as raw audio and video data are never really considered part of the larger part of the digital art but belong to the category of information art.
For instance, Andy Warhol did a good job in creating a form of digital art where the computer was publicly incorporated into the actual artistic works publicly. In this instance, they captured an image from a video camera and then did the technological magic of converting it into a graphic program. The artist then proceeded to manipulate the image by using flood fills to add color to it. (Bunnell, 1998)
